The Old Un’s Notes
The day this issue of The Oldie comes out falls on a significant anniversary in AngloAmerican relations. Seventyfive years ago, on 7th December 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, precipitating America’s entry into the Second World War. By coincidence, it is also the eve of the 76th birthday of the former US ambassador in London Raymond Seitz. In his days at the Court of St James’s, in 1992, the ambassador addressed the Yale Society of London, and gave a talk called ‘Where were you when you heard about Pearl Harbor?’ His parents always enjoyed being asked this question, he said, because they could say ‘We were there’ – his father being a captain of infantry, stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii.
When the attack came, Captain Seitz took his company of soldiers down to the beaches to dig in and await the dreaded land invasion, which never came. The infant Raymond, one day short of his first birthday, was placed in his carrycot and hustled with his mother into a station wagon, to be taken with other families into a pineapple plantation to hide. Everyone later heard about the attack on the radio. The following day, President Roosevelt signed a declaration of war.
‘The news electrified the psychology of the country, and in an instant brought a unity of outrage and purpose,’ said Raymond Seitz. ‘Pearl Harbor was a great defining shock in the history of the nation. In that Hawaiian morning the United States broke loose from its own history and embarked on a half-century of global engagement.’
The Cold War became the enduring structure of Seitz’s professional life, as of all our lives. ‘There was no land too remote, no government too puerile, no conflict too local that we did not see our own interests involved and affected. Berlin, Cuba, Taiwan, Israel, the Congo, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Korea, Afghanistan, Angola are all chapters in this legendary Book of Titans.’
So how does the Ambassador view the triumph, 75 years later, of Donald Trump, friend of Putin, who ringingly declares his intention to ‘make America great again’? ‘Americans aren’t quite sure whether they have voted for a big change or a train wreck,’ he writes in his Letter from America on page 45.
As a career diplomat, Seitz would hardly have welcomed Trump’s public recommendation of undiplomatic Nigel Farage as Britain’s next ambassador to the United States. This was a major breach by Trump of normal diplomatic practice as countries never choose the ambassadors that other governments send them. But also, as a former British ambassador in Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, pointed out on the BBC, Farage would be more likely to promote the interests of the American administration than those of the British government – be Trump’s own ambassador to himself, in other words. Farage, however, didn’t see anything odd about the idea. He thought he’d be an excellent choice, because Trump and he were both businessmen who trusted each other; and trust, he said, was the essential ingredient in business dealings. Neither he nor Trump can see any difference between making business deals and diplomacy.
The cover of this issue portrays the excitement of greedy children laying out a red carpet in anticipation of the arrival of Santa Claus down the chimney. All gifts are of course welcome, but the figure of Santa Claus himself has fallen somewhat from favour in recent years. Some large department stores, such as Harrods and Selfridges, still have fat men with beards sitting in plastic grottos to receive little children, but many don’t, for children have been turning against them. It isn’t a question of whether they believe in Father Christmas himself – probably few but the youngest children still do – but they are finding his impersonators distasteful. They have become associated with smelly drink-sodden old men on whose laps one would prefer not to sit.
Even a decade ago Santa Claus impersonators had fallen into such disrepute that they held an emergency meeting at the Alton Towers theme park in Staffordshire. There they indulged in an orgy of self-criticism. They alone, they agreed, were to blame for their fall from grace. They were too often rude and loutish and drunk. Children recoiled from them in horror. So they adopted a new code of conduct to save their threatened business.
The code covered such things as personal hygiene and alcohol consumption, but also the need to ‘modernise’ themselves to make them seem more relevant to contemporary Britain. They would, for example, need to say ‘hello’ in at least ten different languages and have to know the names of children’s favourite pop songs. They would also adapt their appearances to achieve greater uniformity and put an end to the confusion felt